For Young Newlyweds, a Life Deferred by War

Last New Years Eve, Adrianna Rojas, 17, learned that her boyfriend Jonathan Gordon, 20, was going to be shipped to Iraq with the New Jersey National Guard, so she proposed to him right there on the spot. Adrianna was a high school senior and Jonathan pumped gas at a Citgo on Route 57 in Hackettstown, NJ.

When Jonathan and Adrianna met in early June 2007, she didn’t know it, but he was already planning to enlist. He’d been talking to a recruiter from the Hackettstown Armory who used to take his meals across the street from the Citgo, at the River Star Diner.

“I said, ‘We’re getting married,’ ” she recalled. “He said, ‘You know, I’d marry you in a heartbeat.’ ” But he’d been drinking, and the next morning he told her, “Ade, I have to think it over.”

She gave him a month; she was graduating from high school a half year early and told him she needed his answer by then. In the weeks that followed she tried not to bother him about it, but then she finished up at Hackettstown High, February arrived, and still no answer. “I said I have to know. He said he wanted to wait until he could get a ring — but yeah. So I made him ask me.”

Jonathan’s mother, Denise Gordon, 57, deals regularly with the public — she’s in customer service for A. M. Best, an insurance rating company — and knew what people might say when they heard the two were marrying so young. “Some people think, ‘Oh, she’s pregnant,’ or ‘They’re on drugs or messed up,’ but it’s not any of those things,” Ms. Gordon said. “Adrianna’s just very sure of herself for her age. She’ll make Jonathan’s life so much better.”

On March 1 they married, moving into a $400-a-month apartment off Route 57.

In September, at dinner in a restaurant near Fort Bliss in El Paso — the last time the mother, the son and the 17-year-old wife were together before he shipped out to Iraq — Ms. Gordon invited her new daughter-in-law to move in with her while Jonathan was overseas.